The project
Our objective is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date description of intergenerational social mobility in England and Wales, drawing on new data from the 2021 Census. We will also promote the use of secondary data in the UK for public good, in particular the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study.
Overview
​Is modern Britain an open and fair society? Have the life-chances of children born in the late 1990s improved or deteriorated compared to their predecessors? How do characteristics of local areas such as industrial composition, school quality, and social capital relate to the life-chances of residents? It is questions such as these that we are concerned with in this research project. We will use data from the recently completed 2021 census, linked to previous censuses back to 1971, in order to further our understanding of 'social mobility' - the study of how people's jobs and standards of living are shaped by the social and economic context of their upbringing. This work is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Project team
Emma Gorman
Principal Investigator
Emma is Principal Research Fellow in the School of Organisations, Economy and Society, and a member of the Centre for Employment Research, at the University of Westminster.
As an applied economist, Emma works on topics in education, health and labour economics. Her current research focuses on education, social mobility and labour economics.
Franz Buscha
Co-investigator
Franz is Professor of Economics at the University of Westminster. Franz's research interests are in education economics, labour economics, and applied econometrics. Franz has made scientific contributions to issues such as social mobility, measuring the returns to education, the effect of weather of happiness, political beliefs and identity formation. He has been involved in numerous funded research projects from research councils and government departments.
Patrick Sturgis
Co-investigator
Patrick Sturgis is Professor of Quantitative Social Science at the Department of Methodology, LSE.
His substantive research interests include public opinion dynamics, political behaviour, how neighbourhood contexts influence individual attitudes and group norms, intergenerational social mobility and how this relates to geographical location, and public attitudes to science and technology.
Min Zhang
Researcher
Min Zhang is a Research Fellow in Westminster Business School (WBS). Min's research interests include social mobility, socio-economic inequalities, housing, ethnic inequality, educational inequality, and wellbeing.